Recently, a series of consecutive coin theft incidents have been worrying. Not only did the victims lose millions of dollars worth of coins, almost their entire wealth, but also the platforms involved were not second-tier or third-tier small platforms. They were first-tier major exchanges deeply trusted by a large number of users, or well-known brands that have always been touted for their technical strength, which is truly shocking.
First, there was the case of a Binance user who lost millions of dollars in assets on May 24, as introduced in the June 4 internal reference. Liu Jiaolian also wrote an article on June 5 titled “Blockchain Security ‘Suspicion Chain,'” presenting a model and method for analyzing the security of blockchain assets.
Next was the incident mentioned in the June 10 internal reference, where an OKX user’s account assets were completely looted, with a loss of nearly 5 million (RMB or USD, the victim did not specify). This happened on June 9.
The third case was the hacking of Loopring’s smart wallet, as mentioned in the June 9 internal reference. The hacker somehow broke through Loopring’s two-factor authentication (2FA) system and successfully stole some of the assets stored by Loopring’s smart wallet users. This could be a significant blow to the entire smart wallet race, including products related to the “abstract wallet” that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has always strongly recommended.
Being robbed of coins overnight, like facing a margin call, the individuals involved must have felt their minds go blank in an instant, and the whole world suddenly became incredibly quiet. It’s like the opening scene of “Captain America: Civil War,” where a suicide bomber explodes, leaving survivors temporarily deafened by the shockwave, with background music and the noisy crowd abruptly silenced, creating a terrifyingly quiet scene.
After coming to, what kind of feeling surged in their hearts? Pain? Helplessness? Confusion?
Wishing for a world without thieves is impossible and unrealistic.
What to do? Withdraw coins. Keep your private key safe. Try it out, as the “Suspicion Chain” theory has already told you, do not rely on any third-party platform.
Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto clearly stated in the 2008 white paper that the sole reason for the birth of Bitcoin is to “eliminate third parties”: “What we need is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”
Former Binance CEO CZ, who claimed to be a firm believer in decentralization, once tweeted on January 19, 2020 (the original tweet has been deleted, but the screenshot below is from Cointelegraph’s report), advising novice users to keep their coins on our platform as it is safer.
His exact words were: “Many hardcore crypto[s] [organizations] advocate storing their own keys. But the fact is, most people today are unable to ensure the security of keys, let alone prevent themselves from losing them. For most people, a trusted centralized exchange is safer. The statistics themselves indicate the problem. Efforts are needed on the wallet side.”
Liu Jiaolian wants to ask a question: statistics show that 100% of human babies cannot stand and walk upright when they are born. Does this mean that all babies should stop learning to walk and continue to use large factory-made strollers for transportation?
Babies do need strollers after they are born, that’s a fact. But an even more important fact than this is that they need to learn to walk independently at around 1 year old, otherwise they will always be weak.
What does “independent” walking mean? It means not relying on any third party, any auxiliary tools, such as canes, wheelchairs. People who cannot walk independently even as they grow up are called disabled.
There are no physiological limitations to controlling your own private key, the only limitations are knowledge-based and psychological.
If you cannot discard that psychological crutch, you will always need to rely on it to walk with difficulty.
However, this psychological reliance is not always 100% reliable. So relying, relying, and eventually, you will be left without any support.
Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin to enable everyone to stand up independently.
Looking back a thousand years later, future generations may marvel at how today’s humans learned to control their private keys, learned to control and use Bitcoin on the evolutionary scale of human history, comparable to the South ancient apes learning to walk upright 3 million years ago, or humans learning to control and use fire tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago.
In early 2022, a post by a netizen on Reddit can be seen as a summary. The title of the post is, “How likely is it to lose money if it is placed on Binance?”
